I understand. Some peopel just build afiliate sites that have no brand value, so eventually they will get squashed. I am a brand locally, so hopefully this will help me :-) The big players like Zillow, Trulia, etc like 5 to 10 of them will eventually dominate all of the 1st page, because they have strong PA + DA + Content. I do not buy their content, but all of their other factors are too hard to compete against. Hence, I have joined them.

Well if you want things as efficent and low priced as possible having three to 5 big mega players is the way. However, if you want some flavor and personality your old fish shop offered that. People need to decide truly what they want. I myself love local or national and international. When i go to Mexico I do not want McDonalds. Heck wherever you are if I went to you home town I would not want McDonalds- I would want your local food. At home I am kewl with a little McDonalds on the run, but it night it is local food all of the way when I am sittig down for a meal.

Also, as mentioned it is not brand as much as it is size. This could be the need that pops the google over inflated tires aka the google bubble. Maybe facebook will open an engine for searches. Perhaps we will start to see SEO focusing on Bing and Yahoo vs google, etc.

I keep hearing brand. Iknow branding from my marketing classes, and I think common sense, but I am confused here in SEO and Branding. How does branding impact ranking? Are you saying each sector we work on should be a brand. One of my sectors are HUD homes, so I am www.KINGofHUD.com then I do all of my SEO for HUD homes? Then say I have a city I work in for example Maricopa, so I would do www.MaricopaHousingExperts.com , and I am not allowed to do general website like www.AzBestListings.com I guess it is a super wide brand. I am just point blank confused on how branding impacts us up or down. I was told forever ago to not focus on one sector, but to have a website like www.AzBestListings.com that covers it all, because you have to do triple the work load for the seo benefit if you have three websites vs one mall of a site.

I am not DR SEO, but I can tell you the future failure of the system of synthetic social media. Just like buying links we are going to have a run up of false social media popularity. What google fails to understand = everytime they tweak something people just learn it and deliver synthetic results. There is no way around it. They can look at bounce rate, sodical media, back links, content, etc, but so can the SEO GODS. All Google is doing is making the SEO GODs richer by forcing new business practices to be used to rank in the top 5 of google. In turn, they are alienating the little fish and leaving only room for the big fish to play, since the little fish cannot afford it. In my business this means Zillow, Yahoo, Trulia, Realtor.com, and a few others will own the 1st page. Hence, forcing us little fish to fight for PPC. Then I would say the Medium fish will win the war on PPC.